One of the Boys
by Robina Snyder
Summary: The short and funny tale of how Adam ended up wearing some of Pepper's lip gloss. 2011 GO Gift Exchange fic.


**One of the Boys**

"_I saw a spider I didn't scream. Cause I can belch the alphabet, just double dog dare me. And I chose guitar over ballet, and I take these suckers down cause they just get in my way." _

"Shit," Pepper muttered with the furious annoyance of someone whose mp3 player had hit on a song they didn't want to hear, but they had their hands too full to change it. Her tone also had the hint of frustration common to high school girls who liked hard rock but also who happened to have little sisters who love American pop singers and whose sisters also happened to use their mp3 player.

"_So I don't want to be one of the boys, one of your guys. Just give me a chance to prove to you tonight that I just want to be one of the girls, pretty in pearls, not one of the boys."_

"Well shit," Pepper muttered. Not even the Spanish Inquisition was going to make her admit it, but she had just had just formed a connection with a pop song. She half listened to the song as she found some place to dump her armload of clothes so she could start the song over.

"Well, shit," Pepper muttered again, exactly four minutes and seven seconds later. "Just fantastic," she said, looking down at the little device in her hands. Just absolutely fantastic. She glanced around again to see if anyone (her little sister) was there to see before she hit replay again.

On a normal day in Pepper's life she wouldn't have listened to a pop song. In fact she would have snapped at her little sister for putting such crap on her mp3 player, and then promptly deleted all of it, followed by telling their mother to buy her little sister and mp3 player already, because this one was hers and she wasn't sharing. But this wasn't a normal day. That had been the day that Pepper figured out she was absolutely head over heels in love with Adam Young, and as someone who very firmly did not fall in love it had been a very strange day.

She didn't exactly know how long she'd been standing there were a pile of dirty laundry on her bed, listening to a pop song on loop when she should have been taking said dirty laundry to the machine and skipping said pop song in favor of something that could have easily involved head banging with out being retarded or ironic. She hit replay one more time and found herself looking at herself in the mirror.

What looked back at her was the problem. It wasn't that Pepper didn't think she was awesome, because she completely was, but she was seventeen and for the first time in her life actually feeling self conscious of her looks. She wore tee shirts and jeans that covered what figure she had. She never wore make up. She'd finally just cut all her hair off in favor of something her mother's hair dresser had called a 'pixie' ("All the young proper British starlets are getting them dear, you'll look so sweet") but only succeeded in making her look more like a boy. She didn't try to cover her freckles (Pepper was the kind of girl who had more freckles than face). She generally just looked like a tom boy and she liked it like that.

She was one of the boys, and she liked that. No one expected her to simper or waste hours getting ready just to look pretty when no one really gave a damn. It wasn't that she didn't foster some wish to be pretty. Of course the type of pretty she wanted to be involved showing off her long legs (her best feature, especially when used to knock someone's lights out) in a short skirt with a machine gun in her hands as she mowed down the nameless faceless bad guys in an action movie, except it didn't need to be a movie, it should be real life. Too bad it was just too much trouble to get into the dress and she didn't know how to apply make up. Normally when such fantasies came into her mind she'd sigh and decide that just the machine gun would work, and that she should ask Adam to create some kind of temporary alternate reality for her next birthday.

Pepper liked her self. She was awesome, but she wasn't the kind of girl that Adam seemed to like. Adam Young had grown up (unlike the rest of the Them) to be exceptionally beautiful, with his blond waves, strong chin and piercing blue eyes. At school he was still their best friend and their favorite Antichrist, but he also was someone made to attract people to him. Everyone wanted to be his friend, all the girls wanted to date him. He was THAT guy. He'd even had a trail of girlfriends, not that he really cared about them, but they had all be the most beautiful girls in school, and Pepper was most decidedly not.

What Pepper didn't know was that most beautiful was not what Adam Young was looking for out of life. For him Lower Tadfield was the best place on earth (and it damn well stayed that way). Adam didn't really want the beautiful girls he dated. He wanted the girl who not only knew exactly what he was and was not afraid of him, but would still beat him in a fight. He wanted the girl who would break a man's jaw for calling her a girl. He wanted the girl who could keep up with him no matter what and who he never had to impress or pretend to give a damn about what she cared about. And he'd realized this precisely three years after the apocalypse that wasn't. Since then he had been very, very aware that Pepper was a girl (though she ignored that fact more than once, much to his embarrassment). But she was still Pepper, and Pepper did not want to be treated like a girl, so he treated her like a boy.

Pepper had no idea. All she knew was that she was about to break something if she heard that stupid song one more time. She angrily held down the off button and ripped her headphones out, stuffing them in her pocket, heading to the kitchen to find something she could chew on angrily so she wouldn't feel quiet so bad.

"Oh, Pepper dear, your eyebrows," her mother said, as soon as she came into the kitchen. Pepper's little sister loved being a pretty pretty princess. Pepper's mother had hoped her elder daughter would catch that particular disease. In those continuing hopes her mother had been ambushing her for beauty treatments since she was thirteen. Today it was eyebrows.

"Can we just get this over with," Pepper snapped. Normally she fought such things more (though she always gave in at some point). That day was different. That day she'd realized she was head over heels for Adam Young, a boy who only dated ridiculously pretty girls. Pepper would never be one of those girls, but a part of her (the part of her that was head over heels for the Antichrist) was willing to try and change a little if it meant that Adam would look at her. That meant letting her mother tame her eyebrows.

But the eyebrows weren't the only thing Pepper changed. She quietly snuck into her little sister's room, swiping some of her beauty supplies to try and use them. It quickly became apparent to Pepper upon looking at her little sister's stash that Pepper had no place being a girl. She swiped only the things she could be sure she could use (lip gloss and nail polish) and got ready for the next day.

The next day Pepper looked different. It wasn't exactly bad it was just weird for Pepper. She'd picked a pair of jeans that hugged her legs more (a pair she normally avoided because it limited her ability to kick someone's head in) and a sweater that her mother and forced her to buy because it 'made her look feminine', but that Pepper had only bought because it was a shocking shade of red (though it did not exactly look right with her hair). She had painted her nails with a very bright shiny red color, which only looked odd because Pepper's hands (which had short fingers compared to the size of her palm) suddenly looked delicate with the polish on it. The most shocking though was the lip gloss.

Okay, maybe she'd put too much on, and okay maybe it was noticeably pink, but Brian did not have to laugh so loud at it, especially not in front of Adam. "Pep's trying to be a girl!" he'd said, like she hadn't been a girl before. She'd nearly broken his head, and then quietly slunk off while Wenslydale tried to stop the bleeding. So what if she didn't look pretty like the other girls, maybe she just wasn't that kind of girl. That didn't mean that she liked being laughed at. Brian should have known better.

Pepper found a curb to sit on where she sat fuming (not pouting, pouting was not something Pepper did). She was still sitting there when Adam found her. "I knew you'd be here," he said.

"It's not like you never don't know where we are," she muttered, not looking at him as he sat down next to her.

"You broke Brian's head on edge of the locker," Adam said.

"And you fixed it," Pepper said. It was predictable now. None of them could ever get too hurt without Adam fixing it. It was how Brian had talked them into trying to hit him over the head with a frying pan to see if it was like the cartoons. It wasn't, but Adam fixed it so Brian only had a head ache for the rest of the day.

"Yeah, but I had to clean up blood and modify people's memories," he said as if it were only the minor annoyance and for him it actually was.

"You'll live, it's not like it took you more than two seconds," Pepper said. "Look, do you need something?"

Adam was silent long enough that Pepper looked over at him. She didn't understand that in his own mind he was warring between telling her what he really thought and making some joke. "Nothing," he finally said.

"It ain't 'nothing' with you," she said.

"Oh, I just had an idea for a joke, if you want to help me," Adam said, and Pepper perked up. His jokes were normally pretty good.

"What can I do?" she asked.

"I need some of that pink lip gloss," he said.

"It's my sister's, I left it at home," Pepper said.

"That's okay," Adam said. "Hey, Pep?"

"Hm?" she asked, looking up. A second later she felt a tug on her arm and Adam pulled her into a kiss, not just any kiss, but her first kiss. Five seconds later it was over, and was a lot more…. Smushy than she thought it would be.

"What?" she asked, blinking rapidly.

"Now we're twins," Adam said with a grin, a good amount of the shiny pink lip gloss on his lips.

"Are you insane?" she asked with a laugh, trying not to feel more than a little heart broken. She didn't realize that Adam felt quiet the same.

"Damn, you used way too much of this stuff Pep," Adam said with an over charming smile.

"Shut up!" Pepper snapped, trying to swipe at him as Adam beat a hasty retreat.

Pepper smiled to herself. She stretched and headed back inside. It wasn't what she wanted, but at that moment what she wanted seemed impossible. It wasn't like the movies where the girl put on a bit of make-up and suddenly the guy she was in love with was all over… and if Adam had been like that then she wouldn't have wanted him anyway. Besides, she got a kiss out of it and she was going to count that as something. She got a good laugh out of it too, and she got to bust Brian's head… so all in all not a bad day.

* * *

**A/N: **

**I wrote this for the GO gift exchange back in December, and somehow it always seemed like too much work to do the minor edits I wanted and post it here... so now here it is. **


End file.
